Resident Evil 4 Remake Is Dispensing With QTEs, But Will Use More Of Ashley

The Resident Evil 4 Remake will drop QTEs.

IGN confirms this detail from Game Informer magazine’s cover story, as their special Resident Evil 4 Remake issue drops today.

Quick time events are a mechanic considered unique to video games, even as it seemed to add a more cinematic element to the medium. Some attribute the first QTEs to LaserDisc games like Dragon’s Lair in 1983. This implementation saw players have to guess what action they had to make and what timing was needed, otherwise the story would stop as the character would be seen dying or failing. Later LaserDisc games like Time Gal or Road Blaster added prompts that would indicate what button inputs were needed, milliseconds before you had to do it. Finally, Sega introduced and popularized the idea of QTEs preceding cutscenes small and long alike, in games like Die Hard Arcade or Shenmue. This is how QTEs are as we know them today.

In the original Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube, Capcom put their own spin on the game mechanic a little bit further. There was one particular QTE that occurs near the end of the game. While an enemy explains story details, they are engaged in a knife fight with the protagonist Leon Kennedy. The knife fight was a QTE, and losing the QTE at any time would lead to Leon dying, and the player having to start over.

It was simultaneously an innovative and problematic way to use QTEs. You would be engaged if you were successful and kept playing. Most players were probably taken out of it because they had to repeat the sequence multiple times until they got the timing. Given how game design had continued to evolve in the two decades since, it would make sense for Capcom’s current Resident Evil team to want to move on.

Capcom is adding other new game features instead. This time, there will be sidequests for Resident Evil 4 Remake. Going back to the original game, you could collect blue medallions to earn a special handgun, so it already had a sidequest. Adding more sidequests will change the way Leon interacts with the world, and it seems Capcom’s developers want to encourage players to do more exploration.

Lastly, a common issue fans had with the original was Ashley Graham. Ashley was used in the narrative as a Macguffin, but her use in the gameplay as an escort mission, was already dated when it came out. To remedy that, Ashley no longer has a health bar. If she gets hit too many times, she will enter a downed state, and if she gets hit in a downed state, the game ends and you have to start over.

This change is intended to simplify the mechanics of having to take care of Ashley. Furthermore, Ashley now functions as a companion character, seemingly inspired by what Capcom came up with in Resident Evil Revelations 2.

In Resident Evil Revelations 2, the characters Moira Burton and Natalia Korda serve to be companion characters to Claire and Barry respectively. They enable multiplayer through the main story campaign, and can do things like enter crawlspaces to open doors from the other side. Ashley won’t be playable like Moira and Natalia, but she will do these kinds of companion actions for Leo. It does sound like these will be puzzle segments in Resident Evil 4 Remake, the same way they were implemented in Resident Evil Revelations 2.

Resident Evil 4 Remake will be releasing on March 24, 2023, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.